Leaking
by Goggled Monkey
Summary: Fry's cut his knee and Bender takes a few minutes to think about it. Friendshippy and slightly fluffy but mostly weird. He is a robot after all.


Ok, this is my first and probably last Futurama fic and I'm actually quite happy with how it came out. I was slightly worried about staying IC especially in dialogue but I think I worked it out. It fell together rather nicely if I do say so myself, though I hope others will agree with me.

Lots of thanks to Catalyst and Sonja for betaing this and being so encouraging. You two rock!

No real couplings unless you insist on reading it that way. I wanted to write a friendship fic, based on the quote below, and play around with Bender's character a bit.

Enjoy

x . o . x

"Fry, I'm sorry. I should've understood how someone can love an inferior creature. Because I love you. Not in the way of the ancient Greeks. But in the way a robot loves a human, a human loves a dog, and, occasionally, a gorilla loves a kitty."

Bender- Jurassic Bark

x . o . x

The meatbag is leaking again. He's not crying, though that has high statistical possibility of happening and he's not sweating, at least, not visibly sweating. The data given by his, mostly whole, program on humans and various other galactic mammalian bipeds insists that the human is undoubtedly sweating because it's just one of those things that meat-tubes do; it's like breathing and eating and breeding. It's disgusting that humans just sit around secreting oils and waste, but he has a program in place, put there since his creation, which forces the computer that is Bender's brain to ignore the human's filth. It's the program that keeps him from actualizing his dream of killing all humans. He still wants to, but the preventative programming holds.

But back to the meat-tube: leaking but not crying. Or sweating.

No, the meatbag is doing the kind of leaking that requires torn skin and dripping plasma and cells. It's as disgusting as sweating but the aforementioned program keeps the unit from murdering Fry and the rest of his species for being gross. Besides, mass genocide really would cause more leaking which is the problem in the first place. Therefore, the unit leaves it be and his highly-damaged-and-barely-functional empathy program makes him scan the wound. It's the top dermal layer scraped on one knee. It isn't fatal. There's a 33.21 chance that if the wound were more serious, the unit would care. However, since it isn't, he doesn't. Humans can heal themselves anyways. The unit finishes off the bottle it holds, taking in the much needed alcohol nutrients, and releases pent up gas which on par with normal operations, ignites.

The process of hemoglobin leaking, which cross-referenced with Sociolinguistics and Etymology files is to be referred to as 'bleeding' on humans, always triggers a narrow pathway into a not very complex emotional response program. They are a parody of human emotions which (of human emotion) he could care less about 'cause he's not a human. Therefore, he labels his emotions, which seem callous to meat-tubes, as 'robot emotions.' His emotional response activates.

He points and laughs. The Fry unit, which the Bender mind has calculated as the best of the biological units he's come across, superior to some robots as well, reacts as a well-written pseudo-robot should. The other mammalians at the office would chastise him for his laughing, waggling their digits saying "Shame Bender Shame. Have some feelings." Fry of course, well written, though biological thing that he is, has never done that. He laughs at his own stupidity and human frailty and mortality with the Bender unit before greeting the robot warmly.

There is a 2-degree change in the colour in Fry's cheeks to indicate some feelings of embarrassment at his injury but the degrees would be higher if Leela had caught him instead of Bender. There was a slim 0.365 chance that Bender could invoke the same feeling in Fry that Leela did which is a lucky thing because even when he was functioning at 100 efficiency, according to his programmers at least, he never had a program that would be able to respond to that. The closest thing that he has is his malfunctioning obedience program that makes him manipulate everyone but he does that to Fry any way.

His blinder slides down and he watches half-lidded, intensifying the pixilation of his observed world.

"So what happened, Fry?"

"What this? Ah, nothing. Leela was all like Fry get the thingy thingy for the ship's thingy and I was all like where are they, I donno where they are, and she says they're where we keep the ship thingies so I was all like, man I don't wanna get the thingies, ya know?"

"Ah yes. Thingies. I know them well."

"Exactly. So I was going to that place and suddenly there was this big thingy there and…" the meatbag poorly impersonates crashing noises, moving his limbs exuberantly to make his point. "Then I fell and I was bleeding and I was all like ow."

"You biologicals make me sick. I don't go around spilling coolant everywhere do I? Except on the weekends or when I'm bored or if I need ta spill stuff on stuff."

The Fry unit shrugs in his biological sheepish glory. "Sorry."

"So anyways, I couldn't find the thingies and I gave up," the Fry unit finishes his story after apologizing for having been created biological and therefore inferior and dirty. "Have you seen them?"

"No! Never saw 'em. I didn't touch 'em! Leela took them. What do you know? You don't know nothing!" the Bender unit threatens, shaking his upper appendage with bent fist simulating digits. Does the Fry unit suspect that the unit has already pawned the ill-gotten thingies for swag, bling and booze?

His logic neural pathways crackle to life and assess the situation before assuring the unit that biological units are easily swayed with toxins running through their disgusting plasma circuits.

He reaches into his chest cavity and pulls out two beers: one for the Bender unit, one for the Fry unit.

"Thanks buddy." Is the Fry unit's response and the Bender unit's audio capacity scans the voice patterns and stores them. The phrase, context, and speaker do not deserve a response. The unit ingests the alcohol instead.

He briefly, for 3/8ths of a second, ponders how amusing it would have been if he had chucked the bottle at the human's head instead. There would have been a pleasing hollow thump, a cry of pain from the Fry unit and the possibility of more hilarious filthy blood leaking. More oft then not, he would choose to throw things.

The Fry unit babbles on but the unit's programming is more interested in double-checking his greatness factors. The conclusion is that he indeed is the greatest. He files this away, programming a simple note so that he announces this fact when visual examinations pronounce there are more life forms around.

"Bender, you wanna go out and do junk and stuff and maybe hang a little?"

"Maybe until I find someone cooler to do things with," the unit expounds, turning his itineration functions to strutting mode.

The two units exit the building walking together with an average distance of 3 inches between them. The Fry unit finishes his beer and tosses the empty bottle over his shoulder to crash on the pavement and the Bender unit follows suit. They both laugh. The unit's robot emotions find a certain humour in wanton destruction and the Fry unit likes to mimic the Bender unit's laughter. The sound produces a pleasing reaction in the CPU of the Unit so he rewards the Fry unit with more alcohol and himself with a stogie. He blows the smoke towards the frail organic unit.

His inner workings whirl. They always calculate. It's what robots, even broken ones designed to bend, always do. They calculate.

Humans are biological and therefore frail. The Fry unit is human and therefore mortal. Mortality means certain death and death should be incomprehensible to the Unit except it isn't. He recalls the date when his logic and emotion thought process reacted to the nature of the unit's being. He recalls the strange humanistic urge for final destruction, shut down, and thinks about the Fry unit and how Fry fixed him. How Fry made him better, to better function as a robot.

His CPU ponders this and other things that don't concern the lump of burnt circuitry that wants money and fame and booze and hot fembot floozies. The thoughts are filed away. Inconsequential.

If he could feel grateful, he would feel grateful for the freedom. If he could feel human love, he'd feel it for this biological unit. However, he only has his robot emotions and he loves Fry the way a robot loves a human, which, of course, is indescribable to meat-tubes.

x . o . x

Thanks for reading. If you liked or if you didn't like please review. Critique is always welcome. Remember I have to learn somehow so any comments are great.

Love and robo-puppies

-Goggled Monkey

Edit to change scene breaks:24/03/08


End file.
